Atomic Loans April 2020: Mainnet borrowing now public, and crossing $350K in total value locked

Transparency is a core value for us at Atomic Loans. It was large driving force behind why we started the company in the first place – Bitcoin holders ought to have access to more transparent financial tools when it comes to their Bitcoin. "Transparent finance for a transparent asset," as we like to say.

...transparency is a value that should not only guide how we build our product, but also how we build our company. It's a value that should govern not just how we communicate with our investors and across our team, but also with our community and users.

After all, members of our community and users are just as much a stakeholder within our company than anyone else. That's especially true in decentralized finance projects, where users are literally entrusting your product and the code we write with their own funds.

Now, as Atomic Loans grows, especially following a new influx of users who came onboard to the protocol following our PR launch a couple weeks back, the need for transparency is even greater! That's why we launched our initiative to share the highlights of the monthly updates we send to our investors.

Below you'll find our updates for April! As always, we'd love to hear your feedback since this is a new initiative for us, so if you have any comments, feedback, or suggestions, let us know in our Telegram group or tweet at us @Atomic_Loans.

-Tony

Within two weeks or so of the public launch of the borrowing side, we’ve crossed $300,000 in total value locked and 100K of stablecoin borrowed!! 📈

KPI’s

Total value locked: $371,616 USD (+238%)

Stablecoin borrowed: $102,647 USD (+177%)

Stablecoin supplied: $137,026 USD (+185%)

Bitcoins collateralized: 30.93 BTC (+230%) / $234,589 USD (+280%)

Active loans: 34 (new metric)

Average active loan size: $3019.03 USD (new metric)

Highlights:

PR Launch

With the help of you, our awesome investors + advisors, our community, and leading crypto publications (eg. The Block, Coindesk, CoinTelegraph), we had a successful PR launch! 🙏

It drove tremendous traffic to our site and application, and site traffic has now settled at a level significantly higher than pre-PR levels.

In conjunction with our PR launch and the going-live of the borrowing side, we also launched a new landing page!

General availability of borrowing on mainnet!

I’ve included a separate section below discussing the learnings from the launch. There’s a lot, so I felt that it warranted it’s own section. 🙂

Borrowing Launch - Customer learnings

Borrowing side

Observed a number of new borrowers who came in after the launch!

Use cases continue to be a mixed bag so far. The most prominent use cases has been: Retail borrowers who have been borrowing for leverage and buy more Bitcoin; Retail borrowers using borrowed funds to pay bills and living expenses.

A major blocker for a number of borrowers is the need for a Ledger hardware wallet to borrow. This has motivated us to prioritize implementing a software solution to deal with the BTC-side transactions.

New borrowers typically start off with a smaller loan for the purposes of testing the platform, before ramping up to a significantly larger loan thereafter.

The common thread across early adopters tend to be the fact that all of them see custodial risk with CeFi as a huge pain. On a pain scale of 1-5, all see custodial risk as a 4 or 5.

Worrying things + Obstacles

Lender USDC supply was maxed out!(Good problem to have 😄)

A week or so after launch, we reached a point where nearly all of the existing USDC funds supplied by our lenders were borrowed. We worked on urgently getting some new lender capital onboard so borrowers can continue borrowing!

Bottlenecks in UI/UX causing drop-off

From our conversations with customers, there are various major barriers when it comes to the current version of our UI/UX. These include the need to have Ledger, the need to install Metamask, and the need to purchase some ETH for gas. We're working on ways to reduce these UI/UX barriers to iterate the interface and make it even more accessible moving forward!

Asks:

Are you connected with someone who has stablecoin (USDC / DAI) they’d be interested in lending out? If so, we’d love an intro!

Are you connected who has Bitcoin and is looking for liquidity for leverage or expenses? If so, we’d love an intro!

Are you or someone you know interested running a liquidator bot and getting the opportunity to purchase Bitcoin at a 7% discount? If so, give us a shout! We need more liquidators to keep the system safe :)

What does Atomic Loans do again?

Atomic Loans is building the first Bitcoin-native solution for decentralized finance. It works by allowing users to lock their Bitcoin in a non-custodial escrow, and borrow an Ethereum stablecoin such as DAI or USDC. We help users to leverage their Bitcoin to trade or pay for expenses without creating a taxable event or losing exposure to Bitcoin price upside.Our vision is to build the decentralized financial infrastructure that uses Bitcoin the way it was intended and vastly improve the transparency and security of Bitcoin-backed lending markets.